Birss said in his July 9 ruling that Samsung’s tablets were unlikely to be confused with the iPad because they are “not as cool.” He declined today to grant Samsung’s bid for an injunction blocking Apple from making public statements that the Galaxy infringed its design rights.

“They are entitled to their opinion,” he said.

It looks like they have to run the ads, but they can still say Samsung copied them.

Maybe not. Citibank screwed something up in Japan -- not sure what, some violation of information disclosure laws -- and it was on the main page for three months -- you had to click a little box acknowledging you'd read it before you could access your account. Hopefully this will be something similar.

I doubt he's ever heard of it. In the UK, no, and I really mean no, US car has the slightest cool factor whatsoever. The coolest judgemobile ever was Scott's bicycle at the Scott enquiry (into illegal arms sales to Iraq).

Have you even looked at the patent in question? Here it is [google.com] in all its rounded corner glory. They patented rounded freaking corners. If you want to get specific, 4 rounded corners on a rectangle. Like the world has never seen that before.

I have no beef with Nintendo ever since I took my broken DS (which I bought used, although not broken at the time) into their Redmond office, and they swapped it out for a brand new one. No questions asked, no paperwork, nothing but pure customer satisfaction.

How does "loser pays" work when a little guy goes after a big company like Apple, Google, or Microsoft with a legitimate complaint

You are saying that $BIG_COMPANY can afford to hire $BIG_LAW_FIRM_A (or else has its own lawyers that are effectively its own big law firm). $LITTLE_GUY has no chance.

But under "loser pays", $BIG_LAW_FIRM_B can take the case; since you stipulated that it is a legitimate complaint, odds are good that $BIG_LAW_FIRM_B will be paid by the loser ($BIG_COMPANY). $BIG_LAW_FIRM_B is not guaranteed to be paid but the odds are good, since they are as big as $BIG_LAW_FIRM_A and the complaint is legitimate. Contrast to the current situation in America, where $LITTLE_GUY cannot afford to pay any big law firm, so if any big law firm agrees to take his case, they are doing it knowing they won't get paid very much.

So, you have brought up one of the major reasons why "loser pays" is better: the defense can automatically scale if needed to match the offense.

The other major reason why "loser pays" is better: filing lawsuits without merit now actually costs money. Maybe $BIG_COMPANY doesn't even file the lawsuit against $LITTLE_GUY in the first place, which is an even better situation for $LITTLE_GUY than having a big law firm handling his defense.

There, that's two ways that "loser pays" helps in the situation you describe.